Texas troops position themselves on riverbank, disperse migrants

As Texas National Guard troops put up concertina wire along the Rio Grande riverbank in El Paso under Operation Lone Star on Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding he deploy federal “assets to address the dire border crisis.” “This terrible crisis for border communities in Texas is a catastrophe of your own making,” reads the letter. It also states that the administration’s “inaction to secure the southern border” is putting migrants’ lives at risk as temperatures continue to dip in Texas. Temperatures are expected to drop to 23 degrees in El Paso this week. The guard arrived in El Paso on Monday – days after Mayor Oscar Leeser issued a local disaster declaration over the growing migrant influx – and hours after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the lifting of Title 42 that would have opened the way for more migrants to seek asylum and enter the United States.

Early Tuesday, the guardsmen began lining the river bank with their green camouflage Humvees as they installed the wire fence along the river, curving it upward toward the border wall. The wire fencing is meant to help reroute the migrants toward the Paso del Norte port of entry nearby, where guardsmen directed the migrants to go in order to request asylum. Hundreds of migrants who had for days been lining up there to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents and ask for asylum dispersed back into Mexico, while hundreds more simply moved further down the riverbank and again formed another line. The Border Patrol began demobilizing its temporary outdoor processing site in the Chihuahuita neighborhood in south El Paso in early December, shifting its operations to sector stations, including the Paso del Norte port of entry, El Paso sector officials said in a statement earlier this month.